The Grandstanding of the New Atheists in Statistics

One phenomena I have always found interesting – even when I was an active part of this phenomena – is the tendency of members of the New Atheist movement to tamper with statistics in an attempt to portray atheists as composing a much larger percentage of the world population than they actually are.

Even when I was still an atheist – and I was very much active in this movement, doing my best to promote it and its fallacious ideas about belief and science and even politics – I realized that what most of us were doing was not exactly honest.  There was an interesting way to rationalize it, though.  I’ll explain.

One favorite survey of the English-speaking New Atheists is Phil Zuckerman’s Atheism: Contemporary Rates and Patterns.  While this was released in 2005 – three years after I had become Muslim – it is one of the most popular propaganda peices currently and is more or less based on the same prototypes I was touting in the late 1990s.

Here’s what you do.  Consider this a how-to guide for New Atheist manipulation of statistics from a former believer in so-called “non-belief.”  Take the statistics on Russia.  There is a minimum and a maximum set, as obtaining exact statistics regarding anything in such a large population is not easy.  Their minimum number of atheists, agnostics and “non-believers in God” – this is all mashed in to one big category – is 34,507,680, or 24% of the Russian population.  Their maximum number is up at 69,015,360, or 48% of the Russian population.  I suppose such a wide margin is expected considering the enormity of the Russian populace.

Anyway, back to the how-to guide.  We have a range between 24% and 48% for the number of atheists, agnostics, and “non-believers in God.”  The most honest thing to do would be to pick some sort of a median, or to simply state the full range up front as Zuckerman did in his study – no bias, just report the findings.  What many New Atheists tend to do – and I did it in the past just as many promote this agenda do now on popular forums and sites such as Wikipedia – is to report only the absolute maximum number.  At times the statement “up to” is included though not always.

Usually, the pitch goes something like this.  The missionary for this movement – and a disproportionate number of them seem to be active in spreading their beliefs on the internet – will start with either two ways: speaking of the supposed collapse of organized religions (and this is often accompanied by prophecies about the end of said religions in the future) or by speaking of the supposed expansion of atheism in the world.  Both approaches tend to be a bit more political than scientific in nature.  “Look at Russia – half their population doesn’t even believe in this stuff!”  The obvious insinuation there – as this is spoken of in the context of the New Atheist attempting to convert another person – is that everyone in Russia who is an agnostic, a non-theist, a non-believer in a personal God, or even simply non-religious falls into the category of atheist.  And not just any atheist, but an integral part of their movement.  The highest possible statistic, of course, is always presented rather than the range.  Viola!  You have now used statistics to paint a country as a haven for New Atheists in an attempt to promote the worldview of unprecedented atheistic expansion.

I can give another example.  The missionaries love to quote the belief that more than half the Japanese population supposedly follow their worldview.  Japan has even been referred to as one of the “most atheistic societies in the world.”  This does not take into account the fact, for example, that roughly half the Japanese population follows Shintoism – an organized religion that can be polytheistic or atheistic depending on the personal views of the practitioner.  This does not take into account the fact that an equally large portion of the Japanese population follows Mahayana Buddhism, another organized religion that can be polytheistic or atheistic depending on the individual.  This does not take into account the fact that huge swaths of the Japanese population practices multiple organized religions and sees no contradiction in this, all while possibly holding atheistic theological beliefs.  This does not take into account the fact that many individuals within Japan practice organized religions intermittently and do not identify themselves as a practitioner of any one religion despite practicing occasionally as the mood strikes them.  And this big claim of the New Atheists does not take into account the fact that all of these various groups combined would make up more than 100% if the same methodology as the New Atheists was followed.  The complexity of religion in Japanese society is hopelessly brushed aside in favor of this grandstanding.

It is interesting to note that only industrialized nations are ever used in the statistical examples of this group.  Poorer and/or less stable nations of the world possessing large percentages of atheists, agnostics, non-theists, non-religious people, and non-believers in a personal God combined – a number of nations in Eastern Europe and East Asia come to mind – do not serve the New Atheist agenda.  Their quasi-religion can only lead to prosperity and stability, while traditional organized religions keep nations in stagnation.  The conclusion has already been made, and any contrary evidence is simply discarded.

Even while I was still using this methodology, I knew it was dishonest.  It was essentially playing games with numbers to artificially inflate the ranks of a disorganized belief system that I nevertheless felt loyalty too.  I have witnessed the same way of thinking in the members of the New Atheists after having left that ideology off long ago.  The justification at the time was that the Christians will also choose the largest possible statistic in the range when speaking of the rise of Evangelism around the world, and anyone remotely resembling their beliefs would be counted as part of the group; why should I not do the same?  It’s simply how the numbers game works.

Can I say that all members of the New Atheists movement and supporters of their prophets carry the same attitude?  No, I cannot say all.  I am sure that there are some members who have truly convinced themselves that atheists are the fasting growing religious demographic in America, or that atheism has never existed in history before and is a natural (linear) progression resulting from scientific discovery, or that followers of traditional organized religions truly are ignorant and deluded people.  The zeal some of these missionaries display when promoting their quasi-religious beliefs all over religion and science forums must be at least somewhat genuine.

It would be helpful to note once again that when I speak of the New Atheists, as many others have spoken of them, I am not referring to simply anyone who does not believe in a God.  The notion that anybody who is a non-theist must subscribe to their movement is another one of the fallacies the New Atheists carry with them.  Ultimately, however, their prophecies about the coming collapse of traditional organized religion and the historical rise of atheism fall flat when scrutinized by their own methodology.  Fundamentalists of all colors are, in the end, betrayed by their own inherent contradictions.